Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin

This book tells the extraordinary story of the clandestine return of movie director Miguel Littín to Chile 12 years after the military coup against the democratically elected President Salvador Allende in 1973. Miguel Littín's life was saved during the coup by a movie buff: `Didn't you direct "El Chacal de Nahualtoro"?' The tragic scenes of the coup continue to haunt the director: `gangs of men in civilian clothes clubbing President Allende's supporters to death. We also saw a line of prisoners with their backs against a wall and a squad of soldiers pretending they were going to execute them.' After the coup, Chile's society turned into a fascist State with book burnings (15000 copies of this book were burned by the Chilean authorities on Nov 28 1986, Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda's house was sacked by soldiers who threw his books onto a bonfire), with summary executions, outright killings of opposition militants and spies all over the place; in one word, a Stasi State. Chile's economy After the military coup, `within a five-year period more goods were imported than in the previous two hundred years by using dollar credits. But when the time came to pay up, the illusion fell away. Chile's external debt increased to $23 billion, almost six times the debt of the Allende administration.' Chile's economic `miracle' made a few of the rich much richer and the rest of the Chilean society much poorer. Free Mason Salvador Allende was a Free Mason. His grandfather established Chile's first Masonic Lodge. Another member of Salvador Allende's Lodge was Augusto Pinochet. Allende made the terrible mistake to consider Pinochet as a brother, while in fact the latter was a member of an international network of intelligence services. It was his job to keep an eye (and report) on the Lodge's activities. Salvador Allende's humanistic philosophy, as well as his outstanding statesmanship, continues to be deeply ingrained in the memory of the poblaciones. G. G. Márquez's book gives a true picture of life under the boots of a fascist dictator. It is a must read for all historians and for all those who want to understand the world we live in.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is known the world over mostly for his novels, especially "One Hundred Years Of Solitude," and one non-fiction book on the drug wars in Colombia, but one of the least recognized of his jewels is "Clandestine In Chile: The Adventures Of Migue Littin," it is both a chronicle of an exiled artist's return to his homeland and a study of what Chile was like under the right-wing dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. So infuriated was the regime when the book was published that Pinochet ordered thousands of copies to be burned Nazi-style. Like Marquez's novels, "Clandestine In Chile" is poetic and lush, heartwarming and heartbreaking as Littin returns to Chile in disguise to shoot a film on Chile under Pinochet and finds himself wandering a nation changed by rabid capitalism and silenced by intense fascism. In one tense moment Littin lies down in his hotel room bed, only to realize that the city of Santiago is DEAD SILENT after Pinochet's curfew is implemented, no cars, not even dogs make a sound. In beautiful prose Marquez describes the epic landscapes of Chile, of the Andes and the mining communities where the workers almost breath fire from the coal they mine. He chronicles the revolutionary days of Salvador Allende, Chile's and the world's first elected socialist president who sparked the fury of the Nixon White House and was overthrown in a September 11, 1973 coup by Pinochet's forces. We meet Chile's poor as they remember Allende and secretly keep mementos from his days in office before "The Terror" came and the Mapucho river flowed with the corpses of the fascist junta's innocent, often young victims. The passages where Littin and his crew shoot their film under the guise of an environmental documentary team are exciting as they try not to be discovered by the regime's informants and police force. At one point they film inside La Moneda presidential palace and come an inch away from Pinochet himself. Marquez obviously respects Littin very much and his admiration for the man and his work is palpable, and being a friend of Cuba's Fidel Castro, Marquez's contempt for Pinochet and the fascist system that was then in Chile is also evident. This adds a unique emotional intensity to the work, like the best non-fiction he brings history to life instead of just providing a kind of academic report. Film buffs will also enjoy this book for Littin's insights into the guerrilla filmmaking process as he gets his shots by any means necessary, always avoiding getting caught even under the most dangerous circumstances. "Clandestine In Chile" is a masterful book, and of the more underappreciated titles in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's remarkable catalogue.

Book is simply awsome. Intriguing characters, especially Hanna. Is she ready? Is she ready???